Diary Of a Steam Addict: Monday Night Combat

I actually pre-ordered Monday night combat so I basically spent a bunch of time playing the beta. Here is the basic jest. Monday Night Combat is a third person shooter where you run around killing things to let your team get to a money ball which you try to destroy. Or you have the other game type which is basically four players trying to defend a money ball against multiple waves of troops. You receive money for kills and other random assortments of things.

Ok now down to my feelings of the game itself.

Here's the good. If you are looking for an area type game then it would probably be good for you. For some short moments you do feel like you are in a video game type game show. The commentator is really funny, and I find myself chuckling at most of what he says. It generally is a fun game to play. It is one of the few third person shooters that I actually feel like the controls are fluid.

Now the Bad: It’s a hack of Team Fortress 2. However, there are major things lacking that Team Fortess 2 did way better. The leveling system is a joke. Unlike TF2 I don't see any real incentive to level. It doesn't feel as though your character gets any better as you progress in levels. There is no difference between a level 1 and a level 10 character. You do get to unlock characters after you save up a certain amount of money, however when I unlocked a character and gave them new attributes there wasn't much of a difference. It didn’t matter which attributes I gave them they all seemed to not really give me much of an edge.

My in between thoughts: In this game there is basically no incentive to waste hours of your life playing this game. Now, this can be a good thing or a bad thing. I haven't decided which. In one aspect since there isn't incentive to level you can jump in and out of this game without any real drawback. Meaning that the game is still fun when you pop back in, and you don't have to worry about spending all your time cultivating a character to get the edge in battle. However, that is always one of the fun things of competitive multiplayers. You want to spend that time. Since you aren't worried about specifically leveling up a single character you do have the option of playing around with the others to find the best one that suits you. Once again a good thing and a bad thing. No real edge, but it gives you the freedom to do what you want.

When my steam friends ask me how this game is I usually tell them that it's "alright". I don't know what else to say to them. I can't really give it a striking endorsement. I can't with good conscience tell someone to drop the 15 bucks to buy this game.

They do include a map editor with the game so hopefully the community can provide some better maps, and extra content. I would like to see some of the Quake II rocket arena maps ported over. I think they would be really fun on this type of play style.